If someone tries to say the left-wing radio shows aren't fringy, check out this exchange from Wednesday's Stephanie Miller show. Jim Ward, the show's impressionist (and a pretty good one), is mocked by the other regulars as a conspiracy theorist, but he just throws them in without comment from the others On Wednesday, he suggested Osama bin Laden is on the U.S government payroll, and Miller just rolled along with it. The context was mocking Fran Townsend as she talked about where Osama is:

MILLER: "That would have been good to, what's the word, Fran - kill him, wouldn't it? - that would have been good. If we would have - " JIM WARD: "Except he's on the payroll." MILLER: -smoked him out, or maybe even got him, oh, I don't know, I'm going to make an old expression, ‘dead or alive,' that would have been great if we'd done that, wouldn't it? JIM WARD: "He was being treated in an American hospital in Dubai just months before 9/11."

This came late in the show's first hour, where they mock "Right Wing World." Is this the kind of quality information that more commercial radio stations will be offering when the Fairness Doctrine is reimposed? Miller just sighed, and moved on to a Bush "dead or alive" audio clip. Apparently, Ward's theory is carried in a book called Corridors of Terror by Richard Labeviere, as cited on the kooky site Prison Planet.